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Art Lovers
A very lucky Swiss farmer named Hanspeter Benz won a competition that allowed him to hang a Picasso painting from the collection of the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in his barn for 24 hours. [The Art Newspaper]
Ted Loos visited with collectors Diane and Arthur Abbey to see their collection of modern art and Japanese baskets. [The New York Times]
Collector Aby Rosen talked a bit about his plans for the Chrysler Building, which his real-estate company bought for $151 million. For one thing, the Cloud Club, “the venue that occupied Chrysler’s 66th to 68th floors from its opening until 1979, operating as a speakeasy during prohibition,” will return. [Bloomberg]
A footnote: fans of artist Matthew Barney will recall that the Cloud Club played a role in his Cremaster 3 project and related artworks. Here’s one owned by the Dallas Museum of Art. [Dallas Museum of Art]
Notre-Dame Cathedral
The speed with which more than $900 million has been raised for the reconstruction of Notre-Dame has led to debates about wealth inequality. “Victor Hugo thanks all the generous donors ready to save Notre Dame and proposes that they do the same thing with Les Misérables,” the French philosopher Ollivier Pourriol wrote. [The New York Times]
Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the former French culture minister who is director general of billionaire François Pinault’s art collection, had called for a 90 percent tax break on donations made to repair Notre-Dame cathedral. Pinault’s holding company, Artemis, said it would not accept tax relief for its planned donation of €100 million (about $112.6 million) to the efforts. “The Pinault family considers that it is out of the question to charge French taxpayers,” it said in part. [The Art Newspaper]
Design
There’s a new version of Helvetica, “the world’s most popular font,” and it’s called Helvetica Now. Arielle Pardes: “It’s designed to be more legible in miniature, like on the tiny screen of an Apple Watch, and hold its own in large-scale applications like gigantic billboards.” [Wired]
Artist Lawrence Weiner, whose work is primarily composed of words, on Helvetica: “Helvetica has a nice enough typeface I guess, sort of dumpy, but it was taken on as showing intellectual power, and I don’t like things that get away with just having power.” [Interview]
There’s a new museum for the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany, just in time for the school’s 100th birthday. “People here are still a bit unsure about the Bauhaus,” Wolfgang Holler, museum director of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, which is behind the institution. “It is still very much a backward-looking place.” [The Guardian]
Brooklyn
Here’s a look inside the art-filled office of Brooklyn Museum director Anne Pasternak. [The Cut]
Amanda L. Gordon: “John Waldron said he’s aware Brooklyn is a no-tie borough, but Goldman Sachs’s president and chief operating officer still wore a red tie and navy suit to the Brooklyn Museum Artists Ball Tuesday night.” [Bloomberg]
The Talent
Anastasia Karpova Tinari has been named director of Richard Gray Gallery, of New York and Chicago. She’ll be based in the latter. [ARTnews]
Awards
Speaking of the Windy City, the Chicago Artists Coalition has given 15 artists micro-grants of $2,000 each. [ARTnews]
Artadia’s 2019 New York Awards are going to artists Hadi Fallahpisheh and Devin N. Morris. They’ll each receive $10,000. [ARTnews]
And More
Matthew Thurber imagines the Whitney Comics Biennial. [The New Yorker]
Conan O’Brien finally got to meet and interview a writer he has long admired, biographer Robert Caro. “I thought these questions tonight were exceptional,” Caro said. “Incisive.” [The New York Times]